Add watermark prints a line of text or a picture on top of the pages of a PDF. People use it to mark a file as a draft before sending it for review, to stamp a company name or logo on a quote, or to write who a copy was made for.
You see the result on a page preview before anything is saved. The pages themselves are copied as they are and the mark is placed over them, so the original text of the PDF stays selectable. The mark itself is a picture. Everything happens in your browser.
How to use
- Drop a PDF on the page or press Choose PDF. A locked PDF cannot be edited here, and the tool says so.
- Under Watermark pick Text or Image. For text, type the words (the default is DRAFT) and choose a Colour. For an image, press Choose image and select a logo or stamp; Change image replaces it.
- Set Opacity and Size with the sliders, then choose the Angle: Straight, Diagonal, or drag the angle slider to anything from -90 to 90 degrees.
- Under Position choose Centre for one mark in the middle of each page, or Tiled to repeat it across the whole page. The size you set is kept separately for each of the two.
- Under Pages leave All pages selected, or choose Chosen pages and type a range such as 1-3, 5, 8-. Use the Page arrows above the preview to check how the mark sits on different pages.
- Press Download. The new file keeps your file name and adds -watermarked at the end. Clear starts over.
When it helps
A freelancer can send a design proposal with a pale DRAFT across it, so nobody uses the file as final. An office can stamp COPY on scanned documents, and a small shop can put its logo faintly on a price list before emailing it to customers. If you hand over a photocopy of a document to a bank, a landlord or a school, writing the purpose and date across it in a tiled pattern makes it harder to reuse for something else.
The Chosen pages option is useful when only part of a file needs the mark, for example every page except the cover.
Tips
- Keep Opacity low for a mark that sits behind the reading, around the lower end of the slider, and raise it only when the mark must be hard to miss.
- A tiled mark at a large size covers more of the page, which makes it harder to remove than a single small one. It also covers more of what you are protecting, so check the preview.
- If the status line says this page has no watermark, the page you are previewing is outside your chosen range. Nothing is wrong.
- Opacity, angle, position and colour are remembered in this browser for the next visit. The text, the logo and the page range are not.
- A very large PDF may take a while to prepare. Wait for the status line before pressing Download.